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This week’s book was one I’d guess almost everyone has lying around: The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I know my copy is from my parents’ basement; another childhood relic (my parents deserve a lot of gratitude for forming my love for reading—-so many books around!).

Here are a couple of downloads to start us off. Click here for the Boardmaker visuals that coordinate with the story (made by Jordan), and here for a SMARTBoard lesson I made. Have students click and drag the appropriate quantity and fruit label into the boxes and use the visual sentence strip to help answer “What did the caterpillar eat?”.

In our speech/motor group we read the story along with some food visuals and a stuffed animal caterpillar (the kids had to listen for their item and come up and “feed” it to the caterpillar). The kids then colored their favorite fruit from the story on the last page of a book our OT printed out (looking for attributes in the picture and if they could label it correctly). Here’s a similar booklet. Next, we split the class into 2 groups—one out at the SMARTBoard with me. The other picked a fruit visual out of a mystery box and then crawled through the tunnel, matching their fruit to one on the felt board once at the end of the tunnel. For snack the kids counted out 4 crackers/4 pieces of cheese and then got to pick from 2 of the fruits in the story (strawberries and oranges). The kids completed a sequencing/matching task with the visual shown below (egg, caterpillar, cocoon, butterfly). Question of the day: What was your favorite food the caterpillar ate?

In some of my articulation small groups we also read the story. Used to target /v/ (very!), /k/ (caterpillar), st- (He was still hungry!), /f/ medial (butterfly). We made easy caterpillars made out of paper strips (say a word, make your caterpillar longer!).

I love finding inspiration on blogs runs by other speech-language pathologists, pinterest, Speaking of Speech…all over the web! I figured I might as well start my own little corner of the speech/language world. While I love contributing to websites like boardmakershare, I don’t think all that many people get to benefit from these activities (love you, Boardmaker, but you’re pricy!). So…here’s hoping starting up this blog will keep me organized and on top of my game! I hope to make it a place where I regularly share materials I’ve whipped up and websites I love.

I’d expect to see a lot of literacy-based activities used in my pre-K program, typically targeting language and articulation. I also work with K-8th grade students for a portion of my week, so will be happy to share great finds for those students as well.

And, just to kick things off, here are a few activities I’m using this week with my pre-K students as we read Does A Kangaroo Have a Mother, Too?by Eric Carle (currently $5 at KOHL’S…they’re also selling a few of the Eric Carle stuffed animals). We’ve been using it to label animals, work on big/little, expand utterances, and—with my articulation students—target a variety of speech sounds (e.g. initial /k/, medial /g/, initial/medial/final /f/, multisyllabic). Click to get to the Google Docs. Would LOVE to hear any ideas you have in the comments!